


Version 119

by pushingcrazies



Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-22
Updated: 2018-01-22
Packaged: 2019-03-07 23:24:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13445622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pushingcrazies/pseuds/pushingcrazies
Summary: Commission for ApprenticeBard on tumblr.comLove hits Chidi like a ton of feathers.





	Version 119

**Author's Note:**

  * For [apprenticebard](https://archiveofourown.org/users/apprenticebard/gifts).



Version 119

His soulmate was a fraud. Didn’t that just figure? Chidi rolled over in bed, unable to sleep as his mind ground away like a - a - a weird grinding thing. A wheel made of sandpaper that rubbed endlessly against a big rock, tearing it down into gravel until all the sharp, pointy bits were gone and there was nothing but a smooth round ball of rock amidst a giant pile of chipped-away sand and stones and the endless sound of sandpaper against rock and -

Wait.

Stop.

Start again.

Eleanor Shellstrop didn’t belong in the Good Place. She was, by her own admission, a very bad person. And she was dragging him into her deception by asking him to give her  _ ethics _ lessons. Further proof she wasn’t a good person - because a good person would have gone straight to Michael and told him the truth. Which would make her a good person worthy of being in the Good Place. Which would mean she had no need to confess because she belonged here after all. A conundrum.

Chidi hated conundrums. They were an endless ouroboros, a Penrose staircase, a beginning without end and an end without beginning. Paradox. Unsolvable.

What was he supposed to do? He could go to Michael himself, but that wasn’t his place. Ethically speaking, it was up to Eleanor to do or not do what was right. But he wasn’t sure she had the means to do so. Therefore, ethically speaking, was it not his duty to give her those means?  _ Teach _ her what the great philosophers had said and how their writings might apply to her own situation.

Was he not, in fact, morally obligated to do exactly what she asked him to do so that she could remain in the Good Place?

Chidi brought his hands up to his temples and rubbed, trying to massage the headache right out of his brain. Okay. Okay, fine. Yes, he would teach Eleanor how to be a good person, to fit in with the rest of the good, morally-upstanding people here. It was up to him to make sure the whole thing turned out okay.

No pressure.

\---

It started out slow.

Not just the learning - although, that too was extraordinarily gradual in coming - but, just,  _ everything _ . Chidi didn’t know what to call it at first. Eleanor was so vivacious and spirited (with both good- and mean- prefixes at indiscernible intervals) and willing to learn even when the road got tough. When she knew what she wanted, nothing got in her way. It amazed - no, downright  _ astounded _ Chidi. He knew, theoretically, that some people could get an idea in their head and then just - just pursue it without a second thought. He’d even seen some people manage this incomprehensible feat. But he had never been this close to it. Had never been so directly integral to that goal. She needed him, and because she need him he had a first row seat to the very power of decisiveness.

It was intoxicating. Disorienting. 

Seductive, almost.

A few times he very nearly got swept away in Hurricane Eleanor as she blustered and stumbled her way through learning to be a good person. Chidi was a nervous wreck the first few days - weeks. What if Tahani and Jianyu found out? The seemed to snoop around an awful lot - or was that just Chidi’s paranoia talking? Or heaven forbid, what if Michael found out? What if Eleanor slipped up? What if Chidi did? What if he ended up being responsible for Eleanor getting kicked out of the Good Place and put - well, the other place? He couldn’t bear the thought. Eleanor somehow never had these doubts. Or if she did, she hid them under several layers of bravado and optimism and perhaps just a dash of naivety. He marvelled at her and wondered privately once or twice if she could teach him to be a little more like her. Tit for tat, quid pro quo. Lessons in morality in exchange for lessons on not lying awake at night with a double whammy of insomnia and gut-churning anxiety.

They started spending more time together. It happened so naturally Chidi almost forgot to have a soul-crushing moral dilemma. They walked around town as they debated some finer point of morality, and “what did Kitty-guard even mean by his leap of faith?” (“Kierkegaard,” Chidi corrected patiently, “and it’s more accurately translated as ‘leap into faith.”) Chidi couldn’t help laughing at some of Eleanor’s catty observations about the other residents of their neighborhood (“Seriously, she looks like a giraffe met a bad end in a blender”). He felt bad for laughing afterwards and chided Eleanor for corrupting him.

“Oh, I haven’t even begun to corrupt you yet,” Eleanor informed him with a mischievous smile that made Chidi’s insides shiver and his mind bust into overdrive.

_ She didn’t mean anything by it. She’s just a flirty person. She flirts with Tahani all the time, even when they’re bickering _ .

_ But she’s my soulmate. _

_ Not really. She’s an imposter. _

_ It would be wrong for student and teacher to….do….anything inappropriate. _ His mind refused to supply exactly which inappropriate things he might mean by that.

They grew closer. And closer. Eleanor surprised him on a daily basis now. The catty comments subsided and she seemed to be finding her place and settling down.

“Soon you won’t need me anymore,” Chidi said, hoping his tone sounded lighthearted enough to mask his trepidation that that day was coming sooner than he hoped for. How had it come to this?

“Chidi, I am always going to need you,” Eleanor said, her voice carrying a hint of teasing strong enough to make Chidi doubt the words. “You know more about morals than I can ever learn in a hundred lifetimes. Just because I know it’s immoral to, say, punch Tahani in her beautiful, rich face, doesn’t mean I won’t still have the impulse.”

Chidi smiled that tight smile he knew fooled no one and looked down at his feet. “You’ll figure it out.”

Eleanor leaned over and Chidi had just enough time to register the sweet, flowery smell of her hair before she pressed her lips to his cheek. “All thanks to you.”

That night Chidi lay awake for a long time, thoughts grinding in his head once more but this time they were all flavoured with that sweet, flowery smell of Eleanor’s optimism.  _ What if… _

\---

“What’s love got to do - got to do with it?” Eleanor belted out. It wasn’t her usual jam, Chidi had come to know. Too old, too soulful, it was the opposite of her usual self-proclaimed trash pop. So why was she singing it now? “What’s love but a second-hand emoooooootion? Hey, Chidi! Do those old dead guys ever talk about love?”

Chidi raised his eyebrow as he peered over his book at her. She was scooting around the kitchen as she sang, throwing god-knows-what into a pot. Was she cooking or creating some explosive compound? Either one could be possible, and based on previous experience, would have the same results. Eleanor was not exactly what one might call gifted in culinary skills. “What old dead guys?”

“Those old yappers who never shut up about anything. You know, Kootie-catcher -”

“Kierkegaard.”

“Pluto -”

“Plato.”

“Kant, which believe me the only reason I’m getting that name right is because what I  _ want _ to call him would be censored -”

“Okay, I get what you’re saying,” Chidi hastened to interject. “Why do you want to know?”

Eleanor shrugged, peering into a softly simmering pot. Chidi braced himself for the inevitable explosion. At least they were already dead. Although, if they got dismembered in the afterlife did that mean they would remain dismembered forever? “I’ve had this damn song stuck in my head all day and it got me thinking. All those guys ever talk about is good this and benevolence that and hoity-toity bullshirt. Don’t they ever wonder about stuff actual people care about? I mean, love is a universal experience, right?”

Chidi moved closer, fear of being torn to pieces be damned. “Well, maybe not. At least not what we in the 21st century have come to know as romantic love. And to answer your first question, yes. Philosophers have been discussing what ‘love’ is for centuries. The Greeks had four distinct words for love: eros, philia, agape, and storge. And Plato is the reason we have the term ‘Platonic’ to describe certain relationships in our lives.”

Eleanor glanced up at him, and he was struck anew by the earnestness in her expression. Yes, she might poke fun and make up stupid nicknames for the philosophers he taught her about (at this point it was genuinely impossible to tell if she kept forgetting Kierkegaard’s name or if the endless stream of epithets was solely to drive him crazy), but she also took what he said seriously and gave it due consideration, turning it over in her head until she could put it into warped terms that made sense to her worldview. “So some dude from ancient Greece gave women everywhere the perfect excuse to friendzone the jerk trying to get into her pants? The whole ‘I love you but in a friendly way’ gig?”

Chidi gave her a self-deprecating smile. He had been the recipient of that particular speech once or twice. “More or less, yes. But Plato wasn’t the only one who had something to say about love. Kierkegaard fell in love with a girl ten years his junior when he was 24 years old -”

“Skeevy,” Eleanor muttered under her breath.

Chidi ignored the comment. “But he waited a few years to propose to her, and then was so overcome with anxiety he broke off the engagement. He worried that his love and devotion to other aspects of his life - his work and his faith - would make him a terrible husband and father. He wrote a book called  _ Works of Love, _ in which he talks mostly about agape - the love of God for man, and vice versa.”

Eleanor made a poorly-disguised look of disgust. “I’m glad we’re not reading that.”

“Well, it’s not exactly related to how to be a good person,” Chidi said, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

“Isn’t it?” Eleanor asked. Chidi could see that she was giving this a lot of thought, and his heart gave a small leap. She was actually engaging with what had turned into an impromptu philosophy lesson. “Don’t people change after falling in love? Sometimes for the worse, I guess, but generally for the better?”

“I… I couldn’t say,” Chidi admitted softly.

Eleanor regarded him for a long moment. Could she tell that he had never been in love before? He couldn’t get a bead on her at all right now, and it made him feel a little queasy. “I guess I couldn’t either,” she said at last. “At least not romantic love. My love for flaming hot Cheetos definitely never made me a better person.”

The moment of tension passed, and the conversation turned, but the topic stayed lodged in the back of Chidi’s mind. A new song tumbled through his subconscious, not the soulful ponderings of Tina Turner but the dance beat of Haddaway’s  _ What is Love? _

Baby, don’t hurt me.

A fair question but, Chidi decided, not the right song for this circumstance. After all, he wasn’t falling in love with Eleanor so she couldn’t pierce him with that particular arrow.

Right?

\---

It hit him like a ton of bricks, but feather-soft too. A feather-soft ton of bricks. And since a ton of feathers still weighs the same as a ton of bricks, there just have to be a lot more of them over a longer period of time and the impact is no less bewildering and terrifying. How many feathers would it take to equal a ton? How long would he have to be endlessly pummelled by them before it finally occurs to him exactly what is happening to him?

In the end it’s not a feather that does him in, but a tissue. Just as soft, just as light, just as shattering as a that proverbial ton of bricks.

What struck him most afterwards was that he wasn’t even lecturing when it happened. That would have made sense, why Eleanor would be paying attention to him. But he wasn’t, so she shouldn’t have been. But she was. She saw -

Well, he’s getting ahead of himself.

They were in the sitting room together. He was fussing with his glasses (they kept smudging; one would think that glasses would never smudge in the after life - in the place of all things good and wonderful - and yet there was  _ always _ some little dot just in his periphery driving him crazy) while Eleanor studied the reading he had assigned to her earlier that morning. He liked to be on hand just in case she had any questions. But they had been silent for nearly 20 minutes at this point.

He saw Eleanor move slightly, but he was too focused to do more than note the shift in posture at the back of his mind. He bore down on the final fleck of unknown substance just in the crease of where the rim folded over the lenses, and then something both completely ordinary and then absolutely extraordinary happened.

Chidi sneezed.

And when his eyes blinked open after the split-second scrunch that was impossible to resist during a sneeze, Eleanor was already holding out a tissue for him.

It was such a miniscule gesture, but to Chidi it was everything. His heart squeezed as he stared at the tissue held out before him. As if he’d never seen one before.

“Helloooo,” Eleanor said, dancing the tissue in front of his nose. “Calling Great Big Professor Brain, come in Great Big Professor Brain. Did your mother ever teach you how to use one of these or do I have to wipe your nose for you?”

Chidi belatedly took the tissue from her and gently blew his nose. “How did - I mean, were you just holding onto a tissue for some reason?”

Eleanor shrugged, perplexed by Chidi’s amazement at such a simple thing. “No, I grabbed it off the table ‘cause you were gonna sneeze. Your nose does this tiny little twitch right before you sneeze.”

“It does?”

“Yeah, dude. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that? It’s like an adorable little rabbit or kitten,” Eleanor said with a grin.

No. Nobody had ever told Chidi his nose twitched like an adorable little rabbit. “Thanks,” he muttered, turning this new emotion over in his head. It was like affection, but so much more. He wondered what other things about him Eleanor had noticed and catalogued away. He watched the way her hands turned the pages in her book, the way her brow furrowed as she concentrated on deciphering the verbose mental gymnastics of one of Chidi’s favourite philosophers. He’d assigned her a harder text than he had previously, confident she could pick up on the subtle nuances. She was always watchful, always making connections. In life, it had served her well in manipulating the people around her.

What power she could wield now, as she strove to become a better person?

\---

It still didn’t quite happen overnight. Yes, the feathers had been set in motion, but what started out as a gentle trickle did not become an onslaught until a few weeks later, as Chidi and Eleanor walked around the lake.

It was one of their favourite spots. He loved how quiet it was, Eleanor’s stream of chatter notwithstanding. He wasn’t sure what attracted her so often to the spot, but he was glad of her company as they walked slowly around the shore.

At some point he became aware they were holding hands. He hadn’t made the conscious decision to do so, and maybe she hadn’t either. But her hand was soft and warm, and it felt right tucked into his hand, so he didn’t say anything.

Later, he wouldn’t remember what they even talked about. A discussion of moral philosophy that somehow turned into their favourite foods and then movies (Chidi quickly finds he hasn’t seen a third of the ones Eleanor has) and then a friendly debate about which season is the best (Eleanor is adamant it’s summer while Chidi waffles between spring or autumn). Eleanor’s hand was warm in Chidi’s and a gentle breeze blew a strand of her fine hair across her face. Her hand was trapped in his, so Chidi reasoned he would have to reach over for her and brush it out of her face. Except it was hard to walk and brush at the same time without danger of poking her in the eye.

So they paused.

Chidi moved without thinking, possibly for the first time ever in his life or afterlife. One glance at her face looking up at him (she is so small yet so powerful, how is that even possible) and he could feel himself lost. Lost in a way completely unfamiliar to him. No longer stuck in indecision but moving with a surety he never knew he could possess.

He leaned down and their lips met, anticipatory and hesitant all at once. Every other time Chidi had kissed a girl, there had been a million doubts and fears crawling through his mind, and this time they were there still (what if she pulled away, what if she ended up hating him forever) but dim, dull, echoing through the back of his mind so distantly he almost couldn’t hear them. She stepped into the kiss and then his hands were on her waist of their own volition. Her touch, her scent, her movements intoxicating and enticing. He pulled back first, dizzy with an imagined need for oxygen. The dead don’t need to breathe.

Eleanor looked almost as shell-shocked (Shellstropped?) as he felt, but recovered faster. “Shirt, Chidi, how long have you been wanting to make a play on this beautiful piece of ash?” she joked. Self-deprecation didn’t become her, a headstrong attempt to mask her own insecurity. Still the same old Eleanor. Chidi grinned and ducked his head.

“Long enough,” was all he needed to say. 

He took her hand once more and they continued their way around the lake.

 


End file.
